


My Sweet Prince

by FirebirdSong



Category: House M.D., Le Petit Prince | The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen, Inspired by Novel, hilson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2014-11-26
Packaged: 2018-02-27 03:22:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2677169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FirebirdSong/pseuds/FirebirdSong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I was completely isolated, thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by a deep voice."</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Sweet Prince

**Author's Note:**

> Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was one of my favourite books when I was a kid. It remains as one of my favourite books nowadays as well.  
> Somehow, it came to my mind this crossover between it and the always wonderful relationship between House and Wilson in House M.D. The scenes were all taken from the book, and I'm not taking any profit with it. It's all for the sake of good feels.  
> 

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called _Above and Beyond: The Sky and Universe_ , about the galaxies and the stars. It was a picture of a supernova, in vivacious tones of green and red, which happened to be a star that exploded. In the book it said: “Novae and supernovae are stars that suddenly become visible due to a sudden increase of their luminosity. They are created by the evolution of massive stars that explode at the end of their life. However, a supernova can also occur when a white dwarf explodes.”

I knew nothing about massive stars, white dwarves, or even neutrinos, which the book said that were emitted from this explosion. But I thought I knew the stars, and I surely wanted to know more. And after some work with my colored pencils, I succeeded in making my first drawing of a supernova. I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing amazed them.

But they answered: “Amaze? Why should I be amazed by some scribbles and scratches over the paper? Please, Gregory, go back to your room and don’t be annoying.”

That was so unfair. I’ve saw how much grown-ups loved the scribbles of those fancy painters, and I thought that my drawing was a lot better than those. I concluded that grown-ups didn’t like when they couldn’t understand what someone younger than them drew, so I made another drawing: I used my silvered pencil to draw the stars nearby and painted the whole sky behind the supernova with the black pencil. Then, I wrote a subtitle: “Supernova, or the explosion of a star”. I liked how it sounded, and I was sure the grown-ups would understand. They always need to have things explained.

The grown-ups’ response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my surrealistic drawings of stars and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar.

 

********

 

I became an astronomer by heart, and I piloted airplanes for fun. So I lived my life alone, without anyone that I could really talk to, until I had an accident with my plane in the Desert of Sahara, six years ago. Something was broken in my engine. And as I had with me neither a mechanic nor any passengers, I set myself to attempt the difficult repairs all alone. It was a question of life or death for me: I had scarcely enough drinking water to last a week. 

The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. The sky was beautiful then, and I fell asleep with the visions of the universe painted on my eyelids. I was completely isolated, thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by a deep voice. It said:

“If you please -- draw me a reindeer!”

“What?!”

“Draw me a reindeer.”

I jumped to my feet and blinked hard. Before me I saw a most extraordinary young man, who stood there examining me with great seriousness. He wore a long blue coat over his white shirt and pants, and his hair was dark brown, like the trunk of the trees, just like his eyes. But there were stars in his eyes that I wished I could look more closely and map them, to never forget.

 

********

 

It took me a long time to learn where he came from. My Deer Prince, as I came to call him as some kind of mocking after the reindeer incident; I don’t think he ever realized that. He asked me so many questions, but never seemed to hear the ones I asked him. It was from words dropped by chance that, little by little, everything was revealed to me.

The first time he saw my airplane, he asked me:

“What is that object?”

“That is not an object. It flies. It is an airplane. It is my airplane.”

“What!” he cried out. “You dropped down from the sky?”

“Yes” I answered, modestly.

“Oh! That is funny! So you too come from the sky! Which is your planet?”

At that moment I caught a gleam of light in the impenetrable mystery of his presence.

 

********

 

He told me of his journeys, and I… What had I to tell him? It all seemed so cheap before everything he told me on those few days. I, who had always reached for the sky and never been able to touch it with more than my thoughts – there was only so much you could see with the telescopes. He told me of his flower and, in that night, he cried. I didn't say anything.

There was only so much you could learn about love in the books.

He told me about the planets he visited. About the king that ruled no one, about the businessman who owned the stars, about the drunken man who was ashamed of drinking. And he told me about the lamplighter and about sunsets.

“I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset now.”

“But we must wait,” I said.

“Wait? For what?”

“For the sunset. We must wait until it is time.”

He laughed, a delicious sound. “I am always thinking that I am at home!”

And he told me about how he needed only to move his chair a few steps to see the sunset in his planet.

“One day,” he said to me, “I saw the sunset forty-four times!”

And a little later, he added: “You know - - one loves the sunset, when one is so sad…”

“Were you so sad, then?” I asked, “on the day of the forty-four sunsets?”

But the prince made no reply.

 

********

How could I have known, my sweet, sweet prince, that you would fall upon me that way! A fallen star over a deceased man; or so I thought then. You told me about roses, and I couldn’t even recall their smell. You told me about the fox, and I wasn’t sure if I was thinking of the right animal (now I know I was). The fox asked you to tame it, and you didn’t understand.

“What does that mean - - ‘tame’?”

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties. To me, you are still nothing more than a man who is just like a hundred thousand other men. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

“I see. There is a rose… I think she tamed me.”

And the fox told you its secret.

“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose…”

“I am responsible for my rose,” the prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember. A silent tear ran down his face at the thought.

 

********

 

It was the eighth day since I had had my accident in the desert.

“My friend, the fox….”

“My dear lad, this is no longer a matter that has anything to do with the fox!”

“Why not?”

“Because I am about to die of thirst.”

He thought about it a little and answered me. 

“It is a good thing to have had a friend, even if one is about to die.”

 

********

 

On the other day we found a well, and the prince laughed at my astonishment.

 

********

 

“And at night you will look up at the stars. Where I live everything is so small that I cannot show you where my star is to be found. It is better, like that. My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens… they will all be your friends. And, besides, I am going to make you a present…”

He came close to me and kissed my lips softly, then laughed.

“That is my present. Just that. It will be as it was when we drank the water…”

“What are you trying to say?”

I was confused, and afraid. The kiss has been sweet, but it tasted too much like goodbye.

“All men have the stars,” he answered, “but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For the businessman, they were wealth. For you, they were the only light, without sound. All the stars were silent, tasteless, unreachable. You, you alone, will have the stars as no one else has them.”

“What are you trying to say?” I asked again.

“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. In one of then… I will remember you. And when you look at the stars, you will hear them laughing!”

And he laughed again.

“And when your sorrow is comforted you will be content that you have known me.”

And he said nothing more, because he was crying.

 

********

 

And now, six years have already gone by… I have never told this story before. I think the prince went back to his planet, in the end, because after that night when I held his hand until it lost warmth, I didn't see him nor his body.

I sometimes think about the prince and his rose, at how he cried when he found her lying lifeless on the ground despite all his efforts to keep her alive. I sometimes think about my own tears when the soft smile faded from those lips and I was alone, holding the remains of a dead star, thinking that the prince had tamed me and left me to wither. 

There was only so much you could learn about love in so little time.

My sorrow is less violent now. And, at night, I love to listen to the stars.


End file.
